A View of Life Through Central Asia

I had not been to the circus in probably 30 or so years. So when my wife mentioned that perhaps we should take the kids to go see The Garden Bros. showing at The Cow Palace I thought it might be fun for the kids. What I learned is how different my views have become given my experiences. I saw these downtrodden ponies hitched to a pony carousel and I felt so badly for them. But like those mindlessly celebrating the 4th of July in my previous post here were people laughing, smiling and taking pictures while placing their offspring on these sad little ponies. You see something like that and you realize how we too are a part of the animal kingdom and we’re just not as civilized as we think ourselves to be. In fact, a good majority of humanity is still pretty stupid.

The clowns were terrible, the popcorn overpriced but I kept my mouth shut in the hopes my kids might get some enjoyment. I did like the acrobats as they were truly talented but then I experienced something I had not imagined. The Kambarov Riders took center stage and I was fascinated. It was not their tricks on horseback, although impressive I was interested in but their features. I had never seen such a mix of European and Asian before. It reminded me of the stories of the Silk Road on which their country of Kyrgystan sits. Here were the descendants of those that actually traded on the silk road. Europeans mixing with Asians through the generations and now you have a European facial structure with Asian hair and eyes. The experience left me wanting to know more about this part of the world in which I knew nothing.

So I did a Google search and found the book “Restless Valley: Revolution, urder, and Itrigue in the Heart of Central Asia” by Philip Shishkin. I’ve just finished the book and would like to add my notes but first, the revelation which occurred to me after reading.

That revelation is that we are all pawns to be used in the struggle for power and money. This was shown to be blatantly obvious in countries like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan through the stories shared by Mr. Shishkin. But it is also trough although much more subtle in our own first world countries of the USA and Europe.

In the Central Asian countries it is a circus indeed. The wheel of power continually spins with one dictator replacing another each completely corrupt all while the people muddle through it and life goes on. In the USA we engage in wars for profits and become entangled with these dictators as we need something from them. For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it was the need for military bases from which to launch assaults and so the USA engaged in this dance although at times becoming upset with our partners and their awful crimes against their own people. After all, the USA is supposed to be the good guy although whatever shade of it was left after Vietnam is quickly fading as well with our new President Trump.

There is an international elite who craves more power, more money and the focus is on padding their ever increasing wallets while throwing scraps to the people so they can stay in power. Revolutions do occur and if you’ve got the populace storming your gates this is a threat to getting more power and money. So just like the dictators of Central Asia we have Trump putting on a grand 4th of July whilst lining his own businesses and at the same time weakening America. The USA hasn’t started putting the opposition in jail like Central Asia just yet but if we continue on the current course I’m sure it is only a matter of time. We do partake in executions however but this gets into some very shadowy stuff which I don’t want to get into for this post.

In Mr. Shishkin’s book I read of Gulnara Karimova the daughter of the former President of Uzbekistan. She was/is a beauty, controlled vast swaths of the Uzbekistan economy. She also went to Harvard – of course she did! Harvard is the place where the sons and daughters of the world elite go regardless of merit. And true to a circus act she also became a pop-singer under the name Googoosha!

“From her desire for self-expression came her poems. From her poems came the music.”

“Follow @realgoogoosha now to check out exotic pop sensation GOOGOOSHA!”

Her music is available on iTunes but I have to say she choose poorly with her stage name. Anyone here in the states could have told you the name Googoosha just isn’t very catch here as she was aiming for an American audience with such air-headed lyrics as “How dare, how dare, how dare you be so different.” in English as well.

Watching the video one could be forgiven for thinking she was in Morodor with Sauron even making an appearance!

I almost forgot, she also does jewelry under the brand “Guli.” Here is a quote from her website. “It is impossible to disregard, the fact, that the founder of these creative collections is a political scientist whose basic education far, at first sight, from design. Having a Harvard Degree (MA) she has received the degree of a doctor of political sciences, professor.”

Indeed!

So yes, the President’s daughter is ambitious. After power and money what is left but to be a pop singer! And of course she knows it with lines such as “I think God that he endowed me with my height, my face, my features.” “And I thank God that even those who stoop very low in their attacks cannot deprive me of the things that God painted on my face.”

Yes, God cares more for the rich and powerful than the rest of humanity. This is apparent when those in the first world thank God for loving them more than those poor people in the third world.

But at least in the first world we have law, order and a system of government immune from such nonsense right? Of course not, enter Ivanka Trump. There is talk she might run for President when Trump no longer can. Given the state of our society I can think of no-one better who properly represents a culture that idolizes Instagram influencers, celebrities and sports figures over doctors, nurses and teachers. America deserves Ivanka for the way it has supported Trump and rightly so. Now we just need her to get into pop singing and all will be perfect.

I’ve also seen this play out through the sister of one of my old friends at Waseda. She came from ***** and was gorgeous. And it is a rule that kids from the third world countries are all going to be very rich as it was true of my friend. Through the magic of Facebook I saw what her life was like in her country and it was full of beautiful girls and nightlife. They all wore their designer clothes, had plenty of makeup and it seemed they knew they were better than everyone else. Should I have met them in a group I doubt I could stand more than 5 minutes in their presence,,, I would have been a peasant in their eyes anyway I’m sure. But one on one in a foreign land can be very disarming and I liked my friend and thought she was a decent person. She married a really rich kid, had some kids and now has fallen into the role of housewife. Like Princess Makiko it is very difficult once you’ve had a taste of the international jet setting life.

But it was her sister who I wanted to speak of. She too is/was gorgeous and guess what she is? She is the country ambassador to Italy! Indeed. Pretty rich girl gets to be an ambassador quite easily in the third world countries. I think all you need to do is get rubber stamped into Harvard, wear glasses, carry a Versace bag and know how to speak publicly. Men will listen because you’re pretty of course and they would like to get laid. If they were fat and ugly they wouldn’t be able to get any meetings because nobody cares about your little country anyway. This is the hard truth!

But as for the sister, I just looked her up and she is being exalted for her exhaustive efforts in promoting tourism to her country. I’m sure she is just as effective with it as Melania Trump is at putting an end to bullying. Just give them a cause, have them go to a few events then praise the shit out of them.

But let me wrap up this portion of the post with reiterating that we’re all just pawns of the elites and that is the way it has always been. Yes, we were under the illusion we had “people power” in the USA for a while and that was fun. But let’s not kid ourselves nor excuse ourselves from the blame. It was the people who elected Trump so you get what you deserve you stupid, stupid Republicans. The common man is given scraps while the top 1% jet-sets around the world and laughs at the peasants down below.

But true to human form, when some ‘peasants’ do make it to the top what happens? They follow the same pattern, human greed takes over and they become what they were formerly against. Greed is a powerful force and humans aren’t very good at tempering it when millions of dollars are at their disposal. There is always more money to be made!

Now on to my notes from the book.

According to legend, the Kyrgyz were asleep when God was distributing lands to the peoples of the Earth. When the Kyrgyz woke up landless, they pleaded with God to give them at least something. God took pity on the hapless Kyrgyz and gave them a patch of land that he had initially planned to keep from himself.

And I believe it! Through the magic of virtual reality I took a tour of Kyrgyzstan and it is gorgeous with its high, snow-capped mountains and beautiful blue lakes.

Sometime in the seventh or eighth century – the exact dates are obscure in the foggy confluence of history and myth – a warrior named Manas united the Kyrgyz in a rebellion against the tribes of mondern-day China. Kyrgyzstan hasn’t been the same since.

I wondered who this Manas character was as there were many statues of him. I found it interesting that although mythical, the Kyrgyz place such importance on him as the founder of their country and who they turn to for legitimacy. He is the George Washington of Kyrgyzstan but unlike George none of what he is said to have done might actually be true.

Arrival of the American Military Base

Many foreign diplomats, businessmen, students, and drifters also took full advantage of the Wild East flavor of the Kyrgyz capital. These Westerners now roamed Bishkek’s budding nightlife scene with mercenary instincts. The American Pub along with a handful of other watering holes became their default stopovers. In a place like Fire and Ice, an average-looking guy of the unkempt type you’d see in the States sneaking a smoke outside a 7-11 would be surrounded by pretty local girls. Maybe they were drawn to the novelty of it, or to the money, or to some imperceptible foreign mystique projected by the cargo-panted individual with a big mixed drink in hand. When one of these men returned from a vacation in the United States, a friend teased him: “So how did it feel to be fat and ugly again.

So Charisma Man is present in places other than Japan!

The ugliest losers suddenly find themselves objects of attraction by beautiful women when traveling overseas. I’ve known many Charisma Men in my day but that was in Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. In these places the powers of “Evil Western Women” completely evaporate and suddenly a bum can have an assortment of beautiful women. What a catastrophe! But this magic isn’t just for Western Men. One of the saddest things I’ve seen is really awful Chinese and Korean men taking home beautiful young girls from the various clubs. The truth is that the majority of Western guys usually behave much better than Chinese and especially Koreans in a scene like these. Chinese and Koreans can get extremely violent, especially the Koreans. In fact it was well known that prostitutes in Vietnam were often afraid to go with Korean guys due to their violent reputation. And I heard more than a few stories of such violence and it was always the Koreans. Koreans are crazy and I imagine it is due to their country getting run over again and again. Just like starvation has mutated the DNA of Russian women making them extremely beautiful a brutal history has made Korean culture a bit of a madhouse evidenced by their fanatical zeal in megachurches, the self absorption of the women who chase plastic surgery and of course the violence of the men. Korea is a fucking weird place.

So this entry about American bums who look like they would be smoking in front of a 7-11 being surrounded by attractive girls really stuck out to me as I’ve seen this and continue to see it every time I take a trip to Tokyo.

Just as not all Texans are cowboys, not all modern-day Kyrgyz are nomads, but many of them still raise cattle in the mountain villages. Then there are the Uzbeks, descendants of warring Turkic tribes. The Uzbeks tend to live in towns, working as shopkeepers, craftsmen or laborers.

As a lot of Russian stories do, this one starts with Stalin. In his paranoid quest to stifle national consciousness and punish ethnicities he saw as potentially treacherous, the Soviet dictator preemptively exiled the Germans to Central Asia and Siberia Ordered to leave her native Ukraine, Father Victor{s great’grandmother boarded a train to Siberia. With three small children in tow, the great’grandmother flouted her orders and disembarked in Kazakhstan. She ripped out the page from her passport that carried her deportation stamp and started building a new life.

This mass deportation by Stalin and the Soviets serves as a reminder that the history of humanity is a complete mess. A dung heap speckled with a few diamonds here and there.

Uzbekistan has one of the most repressive political systems in the world, but these days the country’s strongman, Islam Karimov, is back in Washington’s good graces. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Karimov became a friend of convenience to America: his country, located on Afghanistan’s northern border, was and ideal platform for launching the invasion to oust the Taliban. The Pentagon set up a military base inside Uzbekistan. Yet by 2005, Iraq had edged out Afghanistan from the top of America’s foreign-policy priorities, and it became harder for the West to put up with the odious regime in Tashkent. In May of that year, Uzbek security forces killed hundreds of protesters in the town of Andijan. As we saw earlier in the book, the scale of the massacre was such that Washington and the European Union could no longer ignore Karimov’s abuses. They demanded an independent investigation. Karimov told them to get lost. The Uzbeks evicted the Americans from the air base. The Europeans slapped Uzbekistan with an arms embargo and a visa ban against key officials..

But now, a few years after Andijan, with Afghanistan returning to the top of America’s foreign-policy agenda, Washington reversed course again and began to court Uzbekistan as a major ally. In effect, Washington rehabilitated the wily Uzbek strongman because it needed his country as a warehouse one more time.

And suddenly America and Uzbekistan were friends once again, human rights be damned.